PRESS

"Frances-Marie Uitti is very much the Grande Dame of the avant-garde" BBC Music Magazine

"Frances-Marie Uitti is a legend"De Standaard, Brussels

"Superlative feverish playing of Frances-Marie Uitti' The Times, London

the cello creates its own scenario of furtive cries, whispers and scurryings, some of which sound as if they have been electronically altered--although, given Uitti's amazing virtuosity, one cannot be sure what she plays actually has been altered. Chicago Tribune

A Lot Of Night Music LAWeekly
Dark Elegies
Similar voices: Uitti, Griffiths
by ALAN RICH

JULY 1 - 7, 2005

WORDS BECOME MUSIC
The sound of Frances-Marie Uitti’s cello resonates in the bloodstream. She would have it so; she has devoted considerable time and effort to enhancing the seductive throb of her instrument — developing a cello with six strings, and a way of playing with two bows. Next fall she starts a year’s residence at Berkeley, working on interactive electronic systems. I have no idea whether she uses this advanced technical stuff when she plays Bach or Dvorák; mostly she has hung out with the composers who match her visions: John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis. Born in Chicago, to Finnish parents, she now lives in Amsterdam, the world’s best place for visionaries.
On a new ECM disc, There Is Still Time, Uitti plays her own music while Paul Griffiths reads his poetry. Griffiths, Welsh-born, a sometime music critic and the author of some excellent writing on new music, has a voice that sounds like Uitti’s cello — don’t all Welshmen? — and he uses it the way she plays: intense, throbbing, now and then breaking off and darting in some unexpected direction. His poetry is darkly tinged with memory — “There it was, and it was, and it is gone.” Single words and phrases seem to dissolve into cello sound, and just as often the process is reversed. “Think of that day,” the poet intones. “Be there again,” he and the cello join to implore. “It was then ... now it’s then again.” In Munich, where poet and cellist first performed the sequence live, Griffiths insisted on appearing barefoot.

There are 17 poems in There Is Still Time, some of few words, some crammed with words and breathless. When its 55 minutes are past, it is nearly impossible to resist playing the disc immediately again.

original

STRINGS
September 2005
There is still time Frances-Marie Uitti, cello; Paul Griffiths, narration (ECM New Series, 1882)

Frances-Marie Uitti’s extended techniques have transformed the cello into a polyphonic instrument that pushes the boundaries of acoustic sound in ways that jog the mind. On this remarkable project, the Finnnish cellist collaborates with British novelist and librettist Paul Griffiths (Elliott Carter’s What Next?, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo), making his debut as a narrator, on emotionally raw ruminations on life and death. Griffiths is scathingly direct; Uitti’s playing is extraordinarily sensitive. Art music doesn’t get any better than this.
Greg Cahill

OPERANEWS august 2005, vol. 70 no.2

GRIFFITHS & UITTI: THERE IS STILL TIME

This recording brings together — in ways familiar and not —two stalwart figures of contemporary musical culture; Paul Griffiths and Frances-Marie Uitti. Griffiths is the prolific author of numerous books, monographs and articles on music, particularly concerning music of the past sixty years. He has been a music critic for both The New Yorker and The New York Times, is a successful author of fiction and has written opera librettos for Elliott Carter (What’s Next?) and Tan Dun (MarcoPolo).

Uitti has long been recognized as a musician of astonishing ability, particularly in the realm of contemporary experimental music. A pioneer in extended techniques for the cello, Uitti has been the inspiration for an entire catalogue of works by composers such as John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi and Louis
Andriessen. There is still time presents Griffiths in his debut as a performer and Uitti in her less common
guise as a composer. The results are extraordinary.
Inspired by Griffiths’s novel The Lay of Sir Tristram, Uitti approached the author in 1997 to see if he had a text she could use as the basis of a composition. Griffiths had been contemplating a compositional
collaboration involving the 482 words of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and this became the basis of
there is still time. In it, the phrases from Ophelia’s lines have been kaleidoscopically rearranged to create new texts. Although the words originated through her, the new character evoked is not Ophelia. Uitti’s music is a mixture of the through-composed and the improvisatory, all incorporating a specific modal tuning that emphasizes the cello’s natural resonant properties. In the recording, Uitti performs on three different versions of the cello, from the purely acoustic to the completely electrified.

Although the above may sound imposing or of small interest to opera-lovers, what results is an exciting
hour-long work with profound theatrical properties. The overall effect is of two distinct individuals carrying on a quixotic dialogue. At times the performers seem to be speaking at odds with each other, at others they seem in complete accord. Often they enhance and reinforce each other, offering different perspectives on the same idea. The music and the words tend to recur in ever-changing permutations, resulting in a combination of unity and continuous variation.

Uitti’s performance is stunning, even when measured by the
very high standard of her past recordings and concerts. In her hands the cello alternately sings and keens, howls and whispers. She is a supremely gifted musician whose ability encompasses everything from standard practice through the most original of utterances. Griffiths proves to have a captivating voice and a strong theatrical instinct.

Rarely does one get to hear a work that so strongly stands out as unique. There is still time is a modern
nocturne. A truly quiet, introspective work, it struck me as best enjoyed in a darkened room. It would make a marvelous second act to a theatrical evening, and one hopes that Uitti and Griffiths will offer live
performances in the near future. Although ECM is to be thanked for including all of the texts, the listener is advised not to consult them on first hearing, as a major element of the work’s dramatic power is derived from its unpredictability.
ARLO McKINNON
OPERA NEWS 2005

ECM

there is still time

scenes for voice and cello Paul Griffiths, Frances-Marie Uitti

"Hardly anyone else can produce such dark lightning with an instrument as
Frances-Marie Uitti creates with her cello. In combination with Paul Griffiths' poetry, her sound achieves an added dimension. We don't have enough room here to discuss the texts. And besides, the mode of expression here would make it practically impossible to follow the lines of his poetic intention.

The sounds which are struck settle like heavy cloud upon valleys of nocturnal silence. We cannot even imagine the texture of these landscapes hidden beneath the sound. Instead, an image of creation is born.
The intensity with which Griffiths lets single words and phrases pass through the cello sounds defines how far they can reach into the consciousness of the listener. The single word seems as if it were only just created in an eternal sound.

One has to devote time to this CD. It has to be developed: the music has to form a path through all the senses into our mind, and from there find a way back, purified, into a pure sensuality…
The power that seems to draw the listener further down, changes into a feeling of energy which carries the soul to unknown heights. It is precisely its un-solemn element that gives this music so much pathos. What remains is a feeling of incredible intensity and relief."

Jazzthetik

There Is Still Time
Frances-Marie Uitti, cello; Paul Griffiths, speaking voice (ECM New Series)
John von Rhein
Published August 12, 2005
This concept album defies categorization, even by the eclectic standards that producer Manfred Eicher has made the hallmark of his venturesome label. Frances-Marie Uitti is a French cellist and composer who specializes in contemporary and 20th Century music. Paul Griffiths is a British music critic, author and librettist who shares her passion for new music. Together they have devised these 17 "scenes for speaking voice and cello" that fuse his poetic reflections with Uitti's music to form a kind of meditative melodrama for today.
Griffiths' carefully controlled delivery gives the words their primacy in the dialogue. Rather than simply mirroring the text, the cello creates its own scenario of furtive cries, whispers and scurryings, some of which sound as if they have been electronically altered--although, given Uitti's amazing virtuosity, one cannot be sure what she plays actually has been altered.
In Griffiths' slow, contained delivery, words and images circle each other, taking on new bite and urgency each time they recur. The power of his poems lies in their severity. They speak dispassionately about passion--or, rather, about the doubts and hesitancies of people living in an electronically "connected" world who are isolated from their emotions but still need desperately to reach out.
The poems, combined with Uitti's minimalist cello undercurrent, give "There Is Still Time" its wistful, rueful, often bleak tone. That tone brightens in the final scene, when Griffiths and Uitti conjure up the time "when we may go and sing in the sun/ And have the sun sing for us/ When all this is over." The performers work wonderfully together and the recorded sound is good, although the voice levels occasionally change from track to track.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

Frances-Marie Uitti, Paul Griffiths
there is still time
Uitti, cello; Griffiths, narrator
(ECM)
"Not quite spoken-word, not quite a poetry reading, this recording gets
into your head and into your thoughts in ways most don’t. Most of that
effect is due to Paul Griffiths’s reading of the words he cobbled
together from Ophelia’s text in Hamlet, but a lot comes from
Frances-Marie Uitti’s shadowing of Griffiths throughout the latter’s verbal meanderings. Griffiths has forged a claustrophobic text that’s hard to escape from; the longer you listen, the more constricting it gets.

For many years, Griffiths was the critic the New York Times turned to
for new-music concert reviews, and he’s written many books on the
subject. Uitti grew up in the Chicago suburbs before heading to Europe
for her training and has pioneered a new technique for playing the
cello with two bows. Put these two freethinkers in a room and something
strange—and almost wicked—this way comes.

Griffiths made the text for the 13 narrated parts—four “Without Words”
are included—from the 482 (count ’em) words Shakespeare gave Ophelia,
refashioning them into constricting, nonlinear monologues. (Sample text
from “I Cannot Remember”: “I cannot remember what thoughts may have
been in my mind_/_on this one of all.”) At some points, Griffiths’s
reading is enough to induce chills, especially with “My One Fear.”

“My One Fear” is a big block of text with no line breaks, spoken in a
threatening whisper. As Griffiths struggles to name what that one fear
is, the sensation that it is near regardless makes naming it
irrelevant, and Griffiths’s voice insinuates itself into your mind like
an evil conscience.

Uitti’s music is a combination of drones and extra-musical effects,
such as tapping on the cello’s body, that fits the discursive words
well. She’s not accompanying him, he’s not fitting the words to her
music; they’re equal partners in messing with your head."—MG

Marc Geelhoed
Time Out Chicago

"… Uitti produces a lovely, warmly ingratiating sound that gives these works every opportunity to sit in the brain and be pondered over. Mr. Griffiths recites these texts with quiet, thoughtful expressiveness, while Ms. Uitti’s passionate cello provides an often more intense counterpoint. For example, consider the second part, think of that day, in which Griffiths’ voice becomes more calm and resolute, while Uitti’s cello line simultaneously ascends and grows ever more passionate, almost piercingly so. Each of the pieces uses calm, carefully placed syllables, almost deadpan in delivery, interwoven with Uitti’s often overwhelmingly emotional playing."

Bruce Hodge
musicweb

This recording represents a remarkable collaboration between two dissimilar but kindred creative spirits. Paul Griffiths--music historian, music critic, librettist and novelist--adopts an extraordinary device: his text uses only the 482 words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." This could be a linguistic game, but read by the author with an actor's communicative skill, the result is grimly disturbing. With time and remembrance as "leitmotives," the hypnotic repetitions, unfinished, unpunctuated sentences and long pauses create an impression of mental disintegration. Addressing an unidentified companion, the speaker seems increasingly to lose contact with reality and, consumed by a nameless dread, to cling ever more desperately to inexorably fading memories. Frances-Marie Uitti's music cushions, underlines, and comments on the words with uncanny empathy for mood and atmosphere, from stasis to passion, melding modal, archaic, and improvisatory elements. Uitti, who has worked with many contemporary composers and written books on music and cello playing, has developed a novel technique that involves playing with two bows to produce sustained multi-voiced polyphonic textures. Here, she combines rhythmic and melodic passages with open-string drones; using three different instruments, including an electronic cello, she produces unusual, often unearthly timbres and sounds. The total effect is haunting, but eerily claustrophobic, as if your heartstrings were being pulled tight, choking off your breath. --

Edith Eisler Amazon.com

Los Angeles Times
Layers of Sound
Cellist Frances-Marie Uitti delivers music that's bold and experimental. By JOSEF WOODARD, Special to The Times
Experimental music, by definition, defies tradition in the pursuit of something as-yet unheard. For Frances-Marie Uitti, the experimental instinct led her to a simple yet expansive gesture as a young cellist growing up in Chicago. She expanded her sound-producing potential by adding a second bow, so that the top bow slides across the top of the strings in the traditional manner while the bottom bow hits only the two outer strings. The result, with more layers and niches of sound than we expect from one string instrument, is simultaneously earthy and unearthly. What seems a radical idea manifests itself in music of haunting beauty in Uitti's hands. By summoning up shifting sonic textures and relying heavily on improvisation rather than prescript material, Uitti conjures up a rich and ethereal atmosphere when she plays live. She paints with the thick palette of overtones that the cello is naturally endowed with, and tends to fill a room with weird wonder... Uitti's career thus far has included work with such noted composers as John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Elliott Carter and the late Iannis Xenakis, as well as musicians from the improv, left-end-of-jazz scene. Her solo show at City Hall promises to expand anyone's preconception of the secret life of the cello.
March 20 2001

The Independent, Los Angeles
News form the Victo Ventura Axis:
In a darkened room in Victoriaville, Quebec, two years ago, one woman, one cello, and tow bows engaged in a mind-expanding, space-altering experiment. The audience got lost in the swirl of sound and the intensityof the txtural moment, in the best possible way. Frances Marie Uitti was doing what she's best known for-cerebral and atmospheric improvisatio ns, doubling her efforts by using bows both under and over the strings. That may sound, on paper, like a gimmick. It's not. Uitti funnels a deep and abstract musical sensibility through an extended technique, coaxing literal new life from her instrument.
Hers is, simultaneously, a definitively physical aesthetic of music-making, but the end result- as with all great music- is metaphysical, hinting at a private world that no words or rationale can suffice in describing. The crowd that the Victo filed out of the performance in a slight daze, having glimpsed something beyond music.
Born to Finnish parents, Uitti grew up in Chicago and studied classically, but heeded a call transcending classical tradition. She developed the two-bow Technique as a way of not only expanding the cello's sound palette, but creating a new multi-layered vocabulary larger than the sum of the sonic parts. In essence, she has unlocked a new spirit hiding in an old instrument. The cello is one of the most powerful of instrumental voice, a singing, overtone-rick instrument with an ominous center.
Drawing attention for her technique and her sensibility, Uitti has worked with noted contemporary composers, including John Cage, Gyorgy Kurtag, Luigi Nono, Louis Andriessen, and the mystical Giacinto Scelsi. But she is also drawn to the improvisational and the experimental 'underground, ' playing with Elliott Shjarp, Pauline Oliveros, and bassist Mark Dresser,

Josef Woodard March 13 2001

'DE FABELHAFTE CELLISTIN FRANCES-MARIE UITTI'
neue Zuricher Zeitung

'But I did find two extraordinary individual Cage stylists at these concerts...and cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, who repeated her afternoon performance of "Etudes Boreales" on the Bowery Ensemble's evening program at Cage's request and not only played with the heat of a high-tension wire and unfailing control and beauty of tone, a virtuoso feat in itself, but also -- which is exactly what Cage wants -- as if each note were a new creation entirely unconnected to anything that had come before.'
Village Voice

Jonathan Harvey's THREE SKETCHES
THREE SKETCHES FOR SOLO CELLO
Three sketches was first performed by Frances-Marie Uitti at the Berlin Festival 'These three short pieces were written for and explore the extraordinary creative virtuosity of Frances-Marie Uitti.'

'During her concert Uitti exceded the very limits of her instrument!'
Music Today, Tokyo

'Frances-Marie Uitti is a riviting virtuoso; her playing is invariably intense; she often favors music by visionary composers.'
Los Angeles Herald

Cello-Legende
"Der Zeit" - Graz, Austria - November 1997

De fenomenale dubbele stok
Jacqueline Oskamp - "Groene Amsterdammer" - Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The cellist with more than one bow to her string
Barbie Dutter - "The Daily Telegraph" - London, England - Saturday, June 22, 1996

féminin masculin
Pierre Hemptinne - "impromptu NEWS 19" - Belgium

La femme aux deux bows
Pierre Hemptinne - "Disco Graphie 17" - Cordes frottées - Décembre 1995 - Belgium

Frances-Marie Uitti and Mark Dresser: "Sonomondo"

photo fritz hauser '04

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